At -0700 10:15 PM 4/22/2003, Craig Lalley wrote:
>Now it all makes sense.  I have a customer who is running an A400-110 and
>it is one of the slowest computers I have ever seen.  As the only user I
>still get awful response times. (2Gb of memory)
>
>Is there anything that can be done to upgrade the horsepower on this
>snail?  I thought it might be possible to at least add a second processor,
>but crashed and burned on that route (HP said it could not be done).
>
>Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated.

Install HP-UX on it.  It will suddenly reveal that trapped inside is a
440MHz 64bit PA-8700 with very fast dual Ultra160 SCSI busses and what are
probably very nice SCSI devices.

As it happens, that's exactly the actual physical hardware in the A400-110
(aka A400-100-110) but because it is apparently crippled in MPE software to
run in short bursts and then freeze everything (both CPU and I/O according
to third-party benchmark testing) for a longer while before running for
another short burst.  The hardware effectively is idle something like
7/8ths of every second.  Another way of looking at it:  The A400-110 only
works 3 hours of every 24 hour day.  The rest of the time it's
paused.  Thank you HP marketing!

Personally, I think it would be nice to have the 3 hours of work all at
once... say from 1 PM to 4 PM every day.  What the A400-110 can do now in
24 hours it could just as well do in three if it got to run at full
steam.  If you spend 8 hours first-shift doing interactive work, 8 hours
second shift running batch and 8 hours at nght running backup and
maintenance, the A400-110 could do them in three one-hour sessions during a
quick afternoon; think of the cost savings in staff!  And you could work
just three hours a day, eh?

As to why the published technical specifications for the A400-110 say it's
effectively a 110MHz system, I prefer to think it was supposed to only be
crippled to 1/4 its potential but someone made an accidental (rather than
intentional) mistake and it got squashed down to 1/8th (or thereabout);
otherwise, it would seem to be disingenuous to have intended it to run at
it's effective speed and then to intentionally decide to market it as
110MHz.  BTW, that 1/8 slowdown effectively reduces the Ultra160 SCSI from
160MB/s to only 20MB/s.... and it increases latency as well as total bandwidth.

P.S. I know some smart folks who argue that crippling the A400 this way is
perfectly reasonable and their arguments have some validity.  As a
confirmed nerd and Cynical-Idealist, however, I find it extremely
distasteful and an incredible waste of fine hardware.

--
Jeff Woods <[log in to unmask]>

In the beginning was The Word
and The Word was Content-type: text/plain
         -- author unknown

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